I will happily second this. Along with Horizon Zero Dawn, this is the most amazing game I’ve played in years. I’ll start it up sometimes just to go horseback riding along the amazing scenery, or go fishing, or bird watching, or hunting, or any number of the seemingly pointless things you can do in that game. It’s very therapeutic, especially after a stressful day.
That's funny, I found HZD a bit too easy on the normal difficulty. There were a few boss fights that where difficult, but not impossibly so.
I think maybe this depends on your play style – I most often went for the strategy of divide and conquer, lure individual machines away from the pack and get them one by one from a distance, usually with a combination of hard point arrows and tear blast arrows to get rid of their most lethal weapons. Whenever I went for using the staff to kill a machine it was too hard, unless it was one of the smaller ones. Also, making use of different ammo to target weaknesses in the machines proved quite effective, and after a little while you just intuitively know which kinda of ammo works against which machines.
Hope you give it another go, I think the story really is worth it!
Edit: definitely second your feelings on RDR2. First rockstar game that had me hooked from start to finish, such a great story. I never played the first one, and I'm a little hesitant to try it because of how great and beautiful RDR2 is, and how well it plays, and I fear playing the previous game will feel too dated in comparison, regardless of how good the story seems to be.
